This paper reexamines the evolution of women's labor force participation (LFP) and employment in Iran
in light of five decades of census data from 1956 to 2006. We show that changes in schooling and
economic structure have fundamentally transformed the nature of female LFP and employment in the
country. Although women's overall LFP rate was slow to recover following a sharp drop in the aftermath
of the 1979 Revolution, it has gathered momentum in recent years. More importantly, an increasingly
larger proportion of educated women aged 20-50 years are employed in the private sector in professional
positions in urban areas. This is quite different from the expansion of female employment before the
Revolution, which predominantly consisted of jobs for very young, uneducated women in rural areas
mostly as unpaid family workers in producing carpets and handicraft. We argue that economic and
political factors after the Revolution have played central roles in shaping the new trends and show that
they are likely to have played a far more important part than ideological ones, particularly Islamization,
did in reducing female LFP and employment during the first decade of the Revolution. The reduction in
female employment during that decade was essentially due to declines of private sector jobs, particularly
low skill ones in rural handicrafts, closely connected with the disruption of production and trade in the
aftermath of Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. In recent years, however, it is unemployment among
educated women that has risen sharply because their entry into the labor force has significantly outpaced
their ability of find jobs. Still, this problem may be temporary because the service sector where female
employment is most common and where the value added per worker is greater than in the rest of the
economy is growing faster than other sectors.